Kaırat: dreamscape lucidity, with lots of trains

Kaırat (Kaırat Mahmetov), in Kaırat. On a train.

Along with Ardak Ámirqulov (director of Otyrardyń kúıre‎ýi), Rashid Nugmanov (director of Igla) and Ermek Shynarbaev (director of Mest’), one director whose name comes up frequently in discussions of the ‘Kazakh New Wave’ of Cinema is the director Dárejan Ómirbaev – a mathematician and film theorist who went to the director’s chair in pursuit of independent vision. I’m here reviewing his first full-length film, Kaırat. It’s somewhat unfortunate, but I enjoyed this film – and had about a similar reaction to it – about as much as I did the later Ulzhan.

Shot in grainy black-and-white, with minimalist dialogue (all in Russian) and minimalist acting, Kaırat seems to invoke ready comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock and especially Robert Bresson. But the film that came most readily to my mind as I was watching, despite the two films being so radically different in artistic direction and style, was Richard Linklater’s 2001 film Waking Life, which I watched in undergrad. The premiss of the film concerns lonely Kaırat (Kaırat Mahmetov), a young Kazakh man who flunks out of university and enters driving school in Almaty, as he tries to navigate love – in the form of fellow-student Indira (Indira Jeksembaeva), old movies, video arcades and trains. Trains are ubiquitous in this movie, even though the film doesn’t really go anywhere. But the comparison to Linklater comes in the fact that the film reads as an extended dream-sequence. The vignettes, spanning Kaırat’s life ostensibly from childhood up through the end of his education, are brief, full of repeating symbolism, incomplete, sometimes surrealistic, and punctuated by Kaırat’s waking up in a different place, usually a train bunk or a dorm bunk – leading himself (and the audience) to wonder if the foregoing wasn’t merely a dream. It’s therefore difficult to comment on the story itself, because that would necessarily involve my – the viewer’s – attempt to sort out which sequences are ‘real’ and which ones are merely dreams. What I can comment on involves the film’s ‘language’: its symbolism (and the way the symbols are juxtaposed or repeated), pacing and cinematography.

The first thing that comes to mind, of course, are the trains. Kaırat rides one into Almaty in the very first scene, as a naughty boy from the countryside who draws on the side of a building in his aul with a piece of charcoal, picks up a rock as Kaırat’s train passes by and hurls it straight into Kaırat’s window, shattering the glass. After that, several of Kaırat’s meetings with (or near-misses with) Indira occur on trains – whether stationary or moving. The symbolism of the rock and the shattered glass repeats, representing rather overbearingly the brokenness and shallowness of Kaırat’s and Indira’s relationship.

Screens in-screen are another intriguing feature. In Igla television screens are repeatedly placed in-camera or just off-camera and audible. In this film, screens are present almost as much as trains. Kaırat’s driving test – with an instructor who is inordinately interested in Kaırat’s love life – takes place on a screen. In the very next scene, Kaırat is on a bus: a very similar-looking bus, on a very similar-looking street. And this is where he first meets Indira, whose arm brushes his as they ride together standing up. (Small gestures like this take on a certain significance, particularly given the film’s sparse dialogue.) Kaırat and Indira go to see several movies together, continuing the screen motif. In one of Kaırat’s disconnected dream sequences he is playing a scroll-up arcade game; arcade games make another appearance as Kaırat waits in a nearly-empty train station as the announcer buzzily and indistinctly announces arrivals and departures. In another scene, his roommates leave the TV on, and the TV plays classical music for awhile before going to static – the dorm mother comes upstairs and turns it off, calling Kaırat and his friends ‘idiots’.

Scenes from Kaırat’s childhood – or what we might take as his childhood, given that it is in a rural setting rather than in Almaty – surface. In one, he is walking with a friend down a dirt road when an angry neighbour gives chase to him. He finds himself all alone, except when he gets inside his house and he sees a neat row of bystanders watching disinterestedly as the enraged neighbour follows him inside. (The row of bystanders imagery gets repeated later in the driving school cafeteria as Kaırat waits for his lunch to get rung up.) Kaırat awakens from this nightmare to his drunk roommate pounding on the door and demanding a cigarette – and he refuses to open the door. This incident haunts him later, as he gets into a fight with the disgruntled roommate and gets beaten up. In another scene he gets on a rickety ferris wheel at a carnival overlooking a riverbend as his mother watches from the ground. Indira and Kaırat’s mother argue over his ‘dead’ body in a scene right after his roommate beats him up.

Again, this film is incredibly impressionistic, and I can’t quite shake the feeling, which I had also with Ulzhan, that it’s an extended exercise in ‘artsy’ pretentiousness. Although I could certainly appreciate the cinematic ‘effort’ and some aspects of the stylistic language, even at seventy-two minutes, I found the film somewhat interminable. As can be seen from my reviews so far, I don’t object to art films per se, but I am finding that this minimalist style is quite decidedly not my cup of shaı. Perhaps I will have better luck with Ómirbaev’s Kardiogramma.